


I promise I’ll love you forever if you please just don’t make me start now

by nereid



Series: Writer's Month August 2019 Prompt Challenge [6]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Multi, Protective Slytherins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 15:41:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20176720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nereid/pseuds/nereid
Summary: Broken kids make for broken relationships.





	I promise I’ll love you forever if you please just don’t make me start now

**Author's Note:**

> for Writer's Month August 2019 prompt 6 - kids.
> 
> Title stolen from Ali Shapiro's poem If I Leave You Then Maybe I Won’t Have to Miss You So Much.

Teenagers are shitty people, Pansy (Draco Astoria Daphne Blaise) should know - they are one.

She breaks something of Draco’s this Tuesday. Not quite his heart, however deep her reach goes under the skin of him, it does not reach his heart, not quite. She might have had it touching her fingertips, that one time, years ago, when they were thirteen - just thirteen, it seems now. So, on that sleepover in the forest near his mansion, which was not a sleepover at all, as much as it was an accident, because he did not want to come back home, and she didn’t know how to say no to him. She forgives herself easily, and it’s what they do anyway - he’ll break her heart next week, same difference.

Blaise can always tell when something is wrong with Draco. He doesn’t have many gifts, he knows, but this is one. That’s what makes it a shame that he doesn’t do anything about it, ever. It’s one of the few rules he has, that he’s taken to upholding, it’s more serious than doing homework and less serious than Azkaban, but it’s in between those two, a stone unmoving, unyielding. Draco snaps at a first-year, somewhere behind Blaise’s back. Blaise continues painting his fingernails, fixated, does not yield, almost. Draco stage-whispers “Fuck off” and Blaise knows wherever Draco might have directed this to, it’s for Blaise’s ears. Blaise flinches and so does Daphne, a chain reaction, intertwining movement. She doesn’t put down her book, but spares him a fleeting glance. Speed of a glacier, and the impact of one.

“You got nail polish on the table,” Daphne says, ice thawing in her mouth as she speaks, because Daphne is ice thawing, if she is anything.

Blaise does not flinch again.

Daphne loves her sister if she loves anyone, and she maybe doesn’t even love her sister. Daphne knows what’s said about them, though, and most of it is said interchangeably, like they weren’t different, like her blood spilled into Astoria’s body and Astoria’s thoughts resided in both their minds. She thinks about these people, but doesn’t tell them anything. She thinks “Fuck you, assholes” but it comes out wrong, so she says it to Astoria, who’s also not to blame for the asshole-like quality of their schoolmates, and even worse, she says is to Blaise sometimes, Blaise who is like kindness set on fire and always gives her condescending advice that he never takes. She feels the worst when she says it to Blaise, because like all of them, Blaise has many things coming his way, or should anyway, but Daphne’s rage spilling out like a volcano isn’t one of them. It must be Draco again, she knows. She doesn’t know this, not really, but overconfidence of a teenager, what can you do. It might be about Draco, is closer to the truth, but it might also be about other boys and girls and those in between. Blaise has never been picky as far as gender is concerned, and he makes up for it by being picky about other things. He’s picky about his friends and his lovers, and Daphne has never been the second, so she has been around enough to see some rotation of the first. The most successful of it, she thinks, was that weird threesome thing Blaise, Draco and Pansy had going on for parts of last year. She didn’t see much of it, she doesn’t think anyone other than the devilest of trios has. They kept it that way, inside and quiet, even after the apparent shipwreck of it. Daphne’s been a friend for years, orbiting somewhere around them, and even Daphne doesn’t have an inkling of what transpired. Life, she guesses. Blaise was too tolerant, Pansy was too much of a bitch, and you looked at Draco the long way and he lashed out on his good days. 

Broken kids make for broken relationships.

That part, before, that was a lie. Blaise has not once in his life ignored Draco, his molecules rebel against it on some fucked up micro-level, turning Blaise’s body against its owner and that’s that. He’s out of the common room mere seconds after flinching, the aftershock of the Draco Malfoy avalanche, oh what stupid lives they lead. His logic is that if he keeps waiting for Draco to actually ask him for help, Draco’ll probably die because he forgets to eat or breathe or some essential shit like that. 

He doesn’t run into Pansy on his way to finding Draco, and that’s either the best or the worst thing. He never knows how the equation goes with the three of them, which x means which y is fucked that week. Mostly, he feels like he’s the one getting fucked, but it’s okay. It’s nothing he can handle, Draco was there for the whole month to sleep in Pansy’s bed and braid her hair after her mom died, and Blaise wasn’t there, he only heard bits later, and those, he guesses, were the edited version, the remix where all the edges are made softer. When Draco wore sleeves to cover the Mark, Pansy made it fashionable and even though not everyone followed the trend, no one wanted to say anything about it in front of her, the same way no one wants to brag about surviving Azkaban in front of Blaise, because his mother didn’t, and Pansy led him to get a magical tattoo of her, because “not forgetting is the most we can do for dead people”, which is what she said to him later. If it works for the dead, Blaise reasons, he can try to apply it to the living ones.

Astoria’s recently moved her wardrobe and is currently reorganizing it and thinking of throwing out all non-black clothing, because it just seems off-putting in the wardrobe, the occasional patches of blue and yellow. She might keep the red pants, because they’re just objectively gorgeous, but maybe keep it limited to red and black, blood and war. She’s not sure what to do with her wardrobe, but it’s an important matter to deal with, so she doesn’t react much when she hears a door opening, and then footsteps. She takes a peak, and it’s Draco, who’s again taken to hiding in her room, because he thinks no one will find him there.

“You know everyone knows you hide in my room?” 

Draco thinks of responding, thinks of saying “No, which is why I’m here”, but he also thinks of saying “Yes, which is why I’m here”. As a compromise, he doesn’t say anything at all.

“What’d they do this time?” Astoria asks, seeming like at the most a third of her attention is on Draco, and the rest resting somewhere in her wardrobe, probably she’s at the task of fixing her life again, one clothing item at a time. She does that, every few months, when whatever starts to feel a bit more undoable than the usual levels of undoable that she gets used to dealing with. Sometimes it’s Daphne, sometimes it’s not. 

“You know I keep all the clothes you throw out every few months? I thought about it at first and it seemed like such a waste, to have a good dress and throw it away because one day you don’t like it, and that’s that?”

“Funny how you think I should appreciate that. I like to make my own choices,” Astoria furrows her brow.

“Besides - “ she continues - “maybe you should apply that to yourself every once in a while.”

On cue, not that Astoria gave him one, so more of a divine cue if anything else, Blaise comes in.

She thinks of saying “Told you everyone knows you hide here”, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know who did what this time, Pansy never tells her much, BFFs means shit when Blaise and Draco and Pansy are on the other side of the equation, avalanche, unstoppable and fatal, where x always points to Astoria, and it’s never significant in the equation.

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, and they don’t tell you this at school, what happens is -

Blaise might be a bit out of breath, because he might or might not have ran a bit, to catch up with Draco. It’s a possibility, Draco can’t tell for sure, and possibilities are worthless, either something’s true or isn’t. Draco has no time for anything less. Like: Pansy might love him. Pansy will fuck him over in the meantime, has fucked him over less times than he can count, yes, but incessantly, like a plague that keeps coming back because he’s not quite ruined enough yet. That’s why Blaise likes him, he guesses. But, not truth, not absolute, no time.

“What do you want?” Draco asks. Find absolutes, keep the focus, in the meantime, dodge.

“What I’ve always wanted,” Blaise, you dramatic bastard.

The truth in this situation is, Draco would like to quip something, would like to leave this conversation with the upper hand, on someone else’s turn to do something. He would like to leave this conversation while he can still leave it, before all he wants to do is Blaise -- and it’s too late, isn’t it.

“Let’s go to bed,” Draco says. Whatever this life thing wants from him, he can deal with it tomorrow. He’s broken Pansy’s heart probably a few times this week already, so what if she also breaks his.

Broken hearts make broken kids.

“I’ll get rid of the clothes,” Draco says, a shrug, non committed, pretense. This is in Astoria’s direction, and Astoria stage-whispers - “Asshole. Thank you.”

Blaise is leading Draco to his bedroom by the hand, to the bed he enlarged to fit all three of them some time last year, when it had all gone on so long it really made fools of them to pretend anything else. He kisses Draco’s knuckles and hopes Pansy’ll be there when they come into the room.

Pansy is there when they come into the room.

“You just -- I want to strangle you sometimes,” she confesses, a secret.

“Think it’d help?” Blaise offers, a solace.

“No,” Draco asserts, the truth.

The bed is luxurious heat. It doesn’t help, maybe - but they hold hands anyway.


End file.
